Tag Archives: War

Over the last couple of days I’ve been playing a lot of Paradox Interactive’s Stellaris. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a galaxy spanning real-time strategy game that is absolutely loaded with random events and AI interactions. These random events and the scenarios it throws up make the game ripe for making self-created narratives in your head.

I started playing it in May, and had some great laughs with a ruler who became addicted to drugs and in doing so accidentally became immortal (I’ve generally been assuming that it’s Melange.) A few weeks back a patch was released that made a lot of my older games incompatible, so I started a new one. I came back to it this weekend to help take my mind off things happening in the real world. (For those following me on twitter you’ll already know that this wasn’t exactly a success.) After two days of almost solid gameplay I stopped for the evening and promptly wrote 2,000 words about the crazy nonsense which had been unfolding. I’ve interspersed the story with some edits of screenshots I took as the game was unfolding. I hope you enjoy it.

I’ve been working on my take of Grenade in the Rain for the past few weeks, slowly slugging away until I finally finished it late last night. I had been planning to work on it this weekend, get down and dirty with some proper writing, show the story who’s boss. That plan sort of fell to pieces when I unexpectedly managed to finish it. Not that I’m really complaining mind you. Since there’s still a whole week or so until I plan on posting everyone’s take on the picture I needed something for this week’s post. I was considering rambling on about something for a while but an alternative presented itself on the way to the supermarket this morning. It was one of those dusty grains of an idea that has been floating around in my brain soup for a few weeks, I initially didn’t give it much thought, I hadn’t even made it into my ongoing text files of “ideas to be used at some later date in the future.” As I was walking it began to rapidly crystallise into something I could write about. What had been only a vague concept and a rant became something I could potentially write about. So I got home, had lunch and spent the next four hours teasing it out of its shell and into the cold, harsh, unforgiving light of reality. One thousand, two hundred and forty or so words later and I was done. I’m somewhat shocked that it got finished so quickly, ordinarily I’d have expected something like this to have taken a lot long, but when you’re on a roll you’re on a roll. So without further ado, I give you a tale of all-out interstellar war and boxing. Continue reading